12 reasons X-Prize billionaires are cheapskates

Commentary: We must invest more and innovate before it’s too late

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, X-Prize billionaires are failing their mission: “Making the Impossible Possible.” Now they need at least $10 trillion to save the world, and a far grander vision, the new “10X-Prizes.”

And their leader, Dr. Peter Diamandis, the co-author of “Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think,” the CEO driving today’s X-Prize Foundation (“Making the Impossible Possible”) and also the Chairman of Singularity University (“Solving Humanities Grand Challenges With Accelerating Technologies”), must step up his game.

Reuters

Entrepreneur Richard Branson waves a model of a LauncherOne cargo spacecraft from a window of an actual size model of SpaceShipTwo at the Farnborough Airshow 2012.

Today’s X-Prize winners resemble slow-moving dinosaurs when you think of the accelerating challenges facing the real world of the coming generation. At best, the top four X-Prizes are feel-good ego trips for billionaires: Branson’s space tourism airplane? Another low-emissions electric car? New lunar lander? Another oil spill clean-up system?

They get big press. But they’re marginal. Not big enough to save the world from itself and the catastrophes dead ahead.

Forget the X-Prizes, what our world needs is a newer, bigger, faster 10X-Prize to tackle the real challenges. And we must start immediately, time’s short. Clive Hamilton, a professor of economics and public ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in Canberra, Australia, details the challenge in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change.” He says we’re our own worse enemy:

“Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions — the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3% a year for a few decades — we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.” Game over?

Yes, ‘the future is better than you think’ ... if you’re in denial

Hamilton warns: “The Earth’s climate would enter a chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us.”

No wonder most humans are in denial, including existing X-Prize sponsors and Singularity grads, because in denial or not global population keeps marching relentlessly from today’s 7 billion to the UN’s predicted 10 billion by 2050.

Get it? Today’s X-Prize is not big enough to “save the world.” But a new 10X-Prize might use a totally integrated model to accelerate the tasks. For several years we’ve been working with a model for innovation and investing based on the 12-part formula in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” 12 macroeconomic sectors that throughout history have explained why civilizations survive or self-destruct.

Diamond warns that as global population and lifestyle demands increase, “more people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources.” And that triggers more wars, famine, pandemics, no-growth economics and political miscalculations.

The pressure builds as all nations begin consuming resources at same rate as America, 32 times more resources, dumping 32 times more waste. We’d need six Earths to survive.

So let’s look to the future and see how Diamond’s 12 macrotrends model might help us build a sustainable planet for 10 billion people, by setting in motion the new 10X-Prizes before 2020.

Goal No. 1: 10X-Prize for Abundant Global Water Systems

Essential to life: drinking, industry, agriculture, transportation. Water is more valuable than fuel for many. Fortune says “Water is the new gold in the 21st century,” generated over a half trillion dollars revenue in 2010, will soon “trade like oil futures.” Already, one billion “lack access to clean drinking water” across the planet. We need massive water innovations: in purification, desalination, bottled water. New strategies like Matt Damon’s Water.org and Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room, increased tenfold.

Goal No. 2: 10X-Prize for Abundant World Food Production

“If you want to become rich, become a farmer,” says Jim Rogers, in “Hot Commodities.” Yet a billion farmers live on two dollars a day. Most are subsistence farmers. Half are underfed. Jeremy Grantham manages $100 billion, warns the planet can’t feed 10 billion. Incentivize Rogers, Grantham, Cargill, Monsanto and others in a bold plan to innovate solutions for $10 trillion in private investments. This challenge is bigger more essential than Kennedy’s moon shot and the Marshall Plan,.

Intraday Data provided by SIX Financial Information and subject to terms of use.
Historical and current end-of-day data provided by SIX Financial Information. Intraday data
delayed per exchange requirements. S&P/Dow Jones Indices (SM) from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All quotes are in local exchange time. Real time last sale data provided by NASDAQ. More
information on NASDAQ traded symbols and their current financial status. Intraday
data delayed 15 minutes for Nasdaq, and 20 minutes for other exchanges. S&P/Dow Jones Indices (SM)
from Dow Jones & Company, Inc. SEHK intraday data is provided by SIX Financial Information and is
at least 60-minutes delayed. All quotes are in local exchange time.